She says, "You have to jump into disaster with both feet."

She throws the broken heels into the bathroom trash.

"I'm not straight, and I'm not gay," she says. "I'm not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure."

A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined. Unknowable. Indefinable. Those were all the words Brandy used to describe me in my veils. Not just a story that goes and then, and then, and then, and then until you die.

"When I met you," she says, "I envied you. I coveted your face. I thought that face of yours will take more guts than any sex change operation. It will give you bigger discoveries. It will make you stronger than I could ever be."

I start down the stairs. Brandy in her new flats, me in my total confusion, we get to the foyer, and through the drawing room doors you can hear Mr. Parker's long, deep voice belching over and over, "That's right. Just do that."

Brandy and me, we stand outside the doors a moment. We pick the lint and toilet paper off each other, and I fluff up the flat back of Brandy's hair. Brandy pulls her pantyhose up her legs a little and tugs down the front of her jacket.

The postcard and the book tucked inside her jacket, the dick tucked in her pantyhose, you can't tell either one's there.

We throw open the drawing room double doors and there's Mr. Parker and Ellis. Mr. Parker's pants are around his knees, his bare hairy ass is stuck up in the air. The rest of his bareness is stuck in Ellis's face. Ellis Island, formerly Independent Special Contract Vice Operative Manus Kelley.

"Oh, yes. Just do that. That's so good."

Ellis's getting an A in job performance, his hands are cupped around Parker's football scholarship power-clean bare buns, pulling everything he can swallow into his square- jawed Nazi poster boy face. Ellis grunting and gagging, making his comeback from forced retirement.

The man at General Delivery who asked to see my ID pretty much had to take my word for it. The picture on my driver's license might as well be Brandy's. This means a lot of writing on scraps of paper for me to explain how I look now. This whole time I'm in the post office, I'm looking sideways to see if I'm a cover girl up on the FBI's most wanted poster board.

Almost half a million dollars is about twenty-five pounds of ten- and twenty-dollar bills in a box. Plus, inside with the money is a pink stationery note from Evie saying blah, blah, blah, I will kill you if I ever see you again. And I couldn't be happier.

Before Brandy can see who it's addressed to, I claw off the label.

One part of being a model is my phone number was unlisted so I wasn't in any city for Brandy to find. I was nowhere. And now we're driving back to Evie. To Brandy's fate. The whole way back, me and Ellis, we're writing postcards from the future and slipping them out the car windows as we go south on Interstate 5 at a mile and a half every minute. Three miles closer to Evie and her rifle every two minutes. Ninety miles closer to fate every hour.

Ellis writes: Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

The electric window of the Lincoln Town Car hums down a half inch, and Ellis drops the card out into the I-5 slipstream.

I write: You spend your entire life becoming God and then you die.

Ellis writes: When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.

I write: All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

Jump to us reading the real estate section of the newspaper, looking for big open houses. We always do this in a new town. We sit at a nice sidewalk cafe and drink cappuccino with chocolate sprinkles and read the paper, then

Brandy calls all the realtors to find which open houses have people still living in them. Ellis makes a list of houses to hit tomorrow.

We check into a nice hotel, and we take a cat nap. After midnight Brandy wakes me up with a kiss. She and Ellis are going out to sell the stock we picked up in Seattle. Probably they're screwing. I don't care.

"And no," Brandy says. "Miss Alexander will not be calling the Rhea sisters while she's in town. Anymore, she's determined the only vagina worth having is the kind you buy yourself."

Ellis is standing in the open doorway to the hotel hallway, looking like a superhero that I want to crawl in to bed and save me. Still, since Seattle, he's been my brother. And you can't be in love with your brother.

Brandy says, "You want the TV remote control?" Brandy turns on the television, and there's Evie scared and desperate with her big pumped-up rainbow hair in every shade of blonde. Evelyn Cottrell, Inc., everybody's favorite writeoff, is stumbling through the studio audience in her sequined dress begging folks to eat her meat by-products.

Brandy changes channels.

Brandy changes channels.

Brandy changes channels.

Evie is everywhere after midnight, offering what she's got on a silver tray. The studio audience ignores her,

watching themselves on the monitor, trapped in the reality loop of watching themselves watch themselves, trying the way we do every time we look in a mirror to figure out exactly who that person is.

That loop that never ends. Evie and me, we did this infomercial. How could I be so dumb? We're so totally trapped in ourselves.

The camera stays on Evie, and what I can almost hear Evie saying is, Love me.

Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, I'll be anybody you want me to be. Use me. Change me. I can be thin with big breasts and big hair. Take me apart. Make me into anything, but just love me.

Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot in a junk yard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We'd go anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.

Jump to the next day we hit a few houses, a mansion, a couple palaces, and a chateau full of drugs. Around three o'clock we meet a realtor in the baronial dining room of a West Hills manor house. All around us are caterers and florists. The dining room table is spread and heaping with silver and crystal, tea sets, samovars, candelabras, stemware. A woman in dowdy scarecrow social secretary tweeds is unwrapping these gifts of silver and crystal and making notes in a tiny red book.

A constant stream of arriving flowers eddies around us, buckets of irises and roses and stock. The manor house is sweet with the smell of flowers and rich with the smell of little puff pastries and stuffed mushrooms.

Not our style. Brandy looks at me. Way too many folks around.

But the realtor's already there, smiling, fn a drawl as flat and drawn-out as the Texas horizon, the realtor introduces herself as Mrs. Leonard Cottrell. And she is so happy to meet us.

This Cottrell woman takes Brandy by the elbow and steers her around the baronial first floor while I decide to fight or flight.

Give me terror.

Flash.

Give me panic.

Flash.

This has to be Evie's mother, oh, you know it is. And this must be Evie's new house. And I'm wondering how it is we came here. Why today? What are the chances?

The realty Cottrell steers us past the tweedy social secretary and all the wedding gifts. "This is my daughter's house. But she spends almost all her days in the furniture department at Brumbach's, downtown. So far we've gone along with her little obsessions, but enough's enough, so now we're gonna marry her off to some jackass."